[mcprwklzpq]

Like everyone else i rely on open source libraries. I sometimes need to change them either to fix bugs that i encounter or to improve them in some way to better fit my purposes.

It is in my best interest to send my changes to the library maintainer so that i do not have to maintain my own fork of the library.

It is not always in best interest of maintainers to merge my changes because it is either more work for them or their purposes for the library are too different from mine.

Maintaining an open source project is a lot of work and i would also like to hear more from maintainers about their motivation to do it.

[Ologn]

Like the PP, I can be using a FOSS application or library and notice a bug, or try to run it against some unsupported device, or against the new version of something. I fix it for myself if I can, then I send the patch upstream. It is like stone soup - the original FOSS project implements something for their needs, I tweak it a little to work for me, and soon enough you have a program useful to a lot of people.

Also sometimes I write something for myself, then think it's possible someone else might find it useful, so I release it as FOSS on say Github. Later I see people watching it, starring it and forking it, and even adding commits to their forks, so I figure someone else must have found it useful.